On the image of God.

Κύδιστ’ ἀθανάτων, πολυώνυμε παγκρατὲς αἰεί,
Ζεῦ φύσεως ἀρχηγέ, νόμου μετὰ πάντα κυβερνῶν,
χαῖρε· σὲ γὰρ καὶ πᾶσι θέμις θνητοῖσι προσαυδᾶν.
Ἐκ σοῦ γὰρ γενόμεσθα, θεοῦ μίμημα λαχόντες
μοῦνοι, ὅσα ζώει τε καὶ ἕρπει θνήτ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν·

Noblest of immortals, many-named, omnipotent,
Zeus, First Cause of nature, helmsman by law --
Greetings. Appropriately I address you though mortal,
For we are born of you; we possess the image of god
Alone who live, and crawl earthbound, and will die.

-- Cleanthes, "Hymn to Zeus" ll. 1-5 (3rd century BCE)


I have been thinking a lot about what Cleanthes -- the second head of the Stoics -- can mean when he says we have the image of God. He doesn't mean what Genesis 1:26-27 means, whatever one makes of it: "And God said, 'Let us make Adam [or: "a man"] in our image, after our likeness ...' And God made Adam in his* image: in the image of God he made him, male and female he made them." The surprising plural (the verb for "said" is singular, as usual with that grammatically plural term for the divine, and Hebrew has no "royal 'we'"); the image and likeness, and then "likeness" dropped in the following parallelism; the juxtaposition of biological sex with the image of God -- they are not the same as Cleanthes' mysteries. Yet the question is the same, and comparison may illuminate. In any event it is impossible to read Cleanthes without hearing the Bible, so we may as well put that to work.

In one way his version should be easier to fathom, for he has more explicit ideas about what God is made out of than does Genesis -- so that it should be easier to understand what an image or likeness or representation (the Greek "mimema" can mean all of those and more) might be. Genesis often speaks as though God had a body, but never -- except here? -- gives any clue as to what such language might refer to. On the other hand, Cleanthes, like all orthodox Stoics, is a pantheist: he believes that "God" and "the universe" do not name or describe distinct entities, he believes that there is no piece of the universe that is not God -- not only not divine, but not God. So the initial clarity gives way immediately to fog. Cleanthes's God does at least have a clear material content, the sort of thing of which a likeness could exist -- but by virtue of the very same thesis, that God is the universe, we lose sight of what it could mean to single out a part of that universe as specially divine.

As Cleanthes was clear where Genesis said nothing, so oppositewise Genesis tells more than Cleanthes about what it means that Adam is made in the image of God. For the ellipsis above covers the omission of a sentence about ruling birds and beasts and land and so on. The plan is clear, if not the execution: God intended Adam to mimic the divine insofar as Adam was intended to rule Eden.

So far we have three options, none of which suits Cleanthes' purposes as stated:

(1) "The image of God" refers to God's physical pattern or shape. Our bodies -- both male and female -- reflect God's body because they resemble it.
(2) "The image of God" refers to God's material composition. As God is made of [body and spirit? spirit only?], so too are we -- and we alone.
(3) "The image of God" refers to God's role in the natural hierarchy. As God rules the universe, we rule our patch of earth.

Genesis endorses (3) and, at least on the face of it, (1). (2) is a part of the way it is often taught among the traditionally religious, in my experience: not that as God is body and spirit so too are we (though perhaps Christians, who do believe that God has been mortal flesh, accept this), but that we have some special divine feature not shared by e.g. table lamps, or cobras. There is also a non-corporeal way of taking the patterns mentioned in (1): as God is merciful, so must we be merciful, as God is just so must we be just, as God feeds the poor and clothes the naked we too must do all we can to leave the world better than we found it. I do not include this as an interpretative option since "image of God" has given way to "imitation of God"; but anyway it is a famous midrashic interpretation. (See Talmud Yerushalmi Peah 15b; Sifre Deuteronomy 11:22; Bavli Sotah 14a; Genesis Rabbah on 23:19; probably more places.)

A fourth option is suggested by the more macabre invocation at Genesis 9:6:

"Who spills a man's blood, by a man shall his blood be spilt, for God created man [or: a man; Adam] in his image."

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity. As we have obligations to God [the passage's context is God reexplaining to Noah how he is to live after he emerges post-diluvian from the Ark], so we have obligations to other human beings, for which God holds us accountable and expects us to hold each other accountable. (This interpretation of Genesis gains some support from its connection with Leviticus 19:2 -- "You shall be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy" -- and Deuteronomy 13:5 -- "After the Lord your God you shall walk.")
****************

With these options on the table, back to Cleanthes. He means a little of each of these, I think, but none of them as stated.

(1) "The image of God" refers not to God's physical pattern or shape but to the shape of a divine life. We participate in God's image insofar as what we require to succeed in life is to resemble God more and more.

(2) "The image of God" refers not to God's material composition (which of course we share, along with everything else in the universe) but to God's nature, which is reason. We are made in God's image insofar as our perfected nature reveals itself too as reason.

(3) "The image of God" refers not to God's role in the hierarchy of nature but to God's unequivocal embrace of nature. We have God's image insofar as we embrace the totality of things, which is God.

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity, of obligation as well as of love -- hence Cleanthes's paternal language. But what this itself can mean, I do not know.

Further things I do not understand in the first lines of Cleanthes' "Hymn to Zeus":

-- the repeated allusion to our mortality -- is it defiant (of death, using divinity as shield)? humble? merely contrasting us with God?
-- "helmsman by law" (or "lawful helmsman") -- what can he mean by law, if not the law of nature that God is meant to embody? and if that, then what does it mean to acknowledge that God rules by law? merely to restate that the law is the true embodiment of everything that's excellent -- it has no kind of fault or flaw -- and God, our lord, embodies the law?
-- "born of you" -- ??????
-- and I still don't understand the meaning of "image of God," or its significance, or the use to which he's putting it here -- though I have my own thoughts on that, for another time.


*Personally I make it my practice to avoid assigning sex or any other attribute, and in particular physical attributes, to the divine; but I cannot misquote a source.